SOURCE: A review of Mea Cuba in Times Literary Supplement, No. 4787, December 30, 1994, p. 7.

In the following review, Gallagher cites examples of repression by the Castro regime in both Mea Cuba and Reinaldo Arenas's Before Night Falls.

How does Fidel Castro get away with it? He has presided for thirty-five years over one of the most oppressive regimes ever known, only a few miles off the coast of Florida. Until recently, he seemed to be surviving thanks only to subsidies from the Soviet Union, but there are no obvious signs of his imminent demise. This despite the fact that life in Cuba is so awful that about one-fifth of all Cubans have left the island, among them most of the country's intellectuals. Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Cuba's Finest novelist, has lived in exile in London for nearly thirty years. Reinaldo Arenas, the best of the younger novelists who started writing...